'I Am Love'

Swinton shines in Old World style

by Kerry Lengel - Jun. 30, 2010 03:20 PMThe Arizona Republic

In the leisurely opening scenes of "I Am Love," we are introduced to an old-money Italian family as it gathers for a formal dinner. Handsome young Edoardo has just lost a yacht race, apparently an annual affair traditionally dominated by the Recchi men. But times change.

'I Am Love'

Good:

Director: Luca Guadagnino.

Cast: Tilda Swinton, Flavio Parenti, Edoardo Gabbriellini.

Rating: R for sexuality and nudity.

Note: Subtitles. At Harkins Camelview.

After dinner, the clan's venerable patriarch makes his long-awaited pronouncement of who will succeed him as head of the business empire: his son Tancredi (Pippo Delbono) and his grandson Edoardo (Flavio Parenti). "King Lear" in turn-of-the-millennium Milan? Maybe.

It takes awhile to be sure that the focus of the story is Edoardo's mother, an aristocratic-looking blonde originally from Russia (Tilda Swinton), and it takes even longer to get any inkling of what might be going on behind the careful mask of a woman who's called Emma and claims at one point to not remember her given name.

American movies usually sprinkle their narrative with guideposts for the audience: Whose story is this? What's at stake? In European cinema, the camera approaches its quarry more obliquely. For those of us raised on Hollywood, you have to switch your brain over to foreign-film mode and let the story sneak up on you.

If you do, you will not be wholly surprised when Emma falls into a fevered affair with the talented chef Antonio (Edoardo Gabbriellini), Edoardo's yachting rival and partner in a proposed restaurant. In Swinton's brilliantly restrained performance, you had sensed tectonic rumblings that had to erupt, somehow.

Yet director Luca Guadagnino does not give up his intentions so easily. You can read Emma's affair and its eventual effect on Edoardo as an inverted oedipal thing, or perhaps as a metaphor for decadence, the embodiment of a family that subconsciously realizes it's in decline and must fight to warm its blood.

Or in any number of other ways: In an American film, you live the story. In a European one, you're an outsider looking in.

Ah, but what a beautiful view. Guadagnino has a painter's eye for composition, and his patient lens lingers on light and shadow and all those lingering looks of mysterious intent, the trace left behind by words never spoken.